Recently updated blogs

Saturday 11th January 2025 Welcome to a new blog series featuring towns and cities around Britain which, by a quirk of history, are blessed with having two railway stations on different lines serving completely different destinations. To kick things off I’ve been to Hertford and had a look at that town’s contrasting pair of stations: Hertford East and Hertford North. As you can see from the map, Hertford East is …

SCORE! About a month ago, I visited the Strelitz Academy in Virginia Beach and it gave me SUCH HEART! Everyone in the elementary school is doing The Let Grow Experience, so there were paper trees in the hall festooned with Let Grow “leaves.” These are leaf-shaped pieces of paper where the kids wrote the new things they’d just started doing on their own: learned to ride a bike, made dinner, …

Stunning. Absolutely stunning. I have ascended. The post Domi and JD Beck – SPACE MOUNTAiN (Live) appeared first on Sampleface.

December was a good reading month and three of my reads were Christmas books. I included some notes on my reading in 2024 at the end of this post. Here is my list of books read:FictionTom Lake (2023) by Ann PatchettThis was a very good book and an enjoyable read. Basically it is the story of a woman telling her daughters about a summer love affair she had with a …

The Vikings, often romanticized as fearsome raiders, were also adept navigators, traders, and settlers. But beyond the swords and sails lies another fascinating aspect of their lives: how they understood and managed health and healing.

It was just a little over a year ago that I briefly softened in my general disdain for Meta (which I held not only for their overall anti-web walled garden approach of the last 20 years, but especially for their role in the last decade’s rise of misinformation). Watching what was going on with their new Twitter clone, I raised an interested eyebrow as I followed their rapid progress in …

What happened was, there was a pretty moon in the sky, so I got out a tripod and the big honkin’ Tamron 150-500 and fired away. Here’s the shot I wanted to keep. Sadly, the clouds had shiftedand Luna had lost her pretty bronze shading. I thought the camera and lens did OK given that I was shooting from sea level through soggy Pacific-Northwest winter air. But when I zoomed …

I had an enjoyable little discussion with Joe Murray of The Human Podcast, part of his new series, called 10 questions in 10 minutes, in which he asks his interview subjects for short answers to ten quick questions on their … Continue reading →

If the case doesn’t settle, Smartmatic’s defamation trial could happen this year.

Accidentally discovered something very interesting while messing around with the Photoshop remove tool, which on certain settings uses generative AI to replace out whatever you select with it. In this case, was just playing around removing stuff from a photo of our living room, and saw that the tool was inventing paintings or posters that don’t exist: That one in the corner, I zoomed in on and went through a …

Some time in 2020 I started collecting CD-ROMs from old Macintosh magazines. Whilst the discs are of Japanese origin—because the supply was plentiful during the extended spring clean of lockdown—they contain a great deal of software from all over the world and a lot of it is therefore in English. They’re an amazing source of old gold: sofware, images, demos, documentation, and many other files. As of today I have …

If you’re going to ask me my favorite foundation at the moment, I’d immediately tell you it’s the Kanebo Lively Skin Wear which I got in an event last 2023. After I tried that, most foundations just couldn’t compare. When I saw that Kanebo has launched another foundation, I knew I had to get it. […]

Just over five years ago (over New Year’s) Viv and I visited Los Angeles, and the part we were staying in is now under an evacuation order 😳 I think it’s still only the second-most shocking thing that’s happened in a place I’ve stayed, though, after the metro station I used, like, every day when I visited Santiago in 2013 was reportedly converted into a torture facility by cops (carabineros …

Sonic Advance 3 is a curious game. It disregards the speed-focused design of its predecessor, but it doesn’t return to the classic style of the original Advance. Instead it forges its own path, partially based on the teamwork-based systems of Sonic Heroes, to create an experimental co-operative 2D Sonic platformer. One that’s long-winded and often tedious, but nevertheless ambitious enough that it might be worth trying out. The story’s slightly …

An end of week recap “If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution.” – Jasper Fforde (born 11th January 1961) This is a post in which I summarise books read, reviewed and currently on my TBR shelf. In addition to a variety of literary titbits, I look ahead to forthcoming publications, see what …